One way to combat today's progressive antisemitism: Double down on embracing Jewish philosophy

 For the past week I have been elaborating on my thesis that most forms of virulent antisemitism are the result of a supersessionism mindset - that the existence and success of Jews and Israel pose an existential challenge to many philosophies and this prompts them to want to eliminate this source of discomfort.

My last article, on progressivism's moral challenge from Jewish philosophy and Israel's success, may point to an avenue to combat this newest and most insidious form of antisemitism. 

It is to double down on teaching Jewish morality. 

I gave my ideas on how to do this to an AI and it organized them better than I could: 

The Problem: Students Lack Tools

• Jewish and non-Jewish students enter college unprepared to counter progressive narratives that frame Israel as immoral (e.g., settler colonialism, apartheid). These narratives often justify violence (e.g., October 7) while condemning Israel’s self-defense.
• Without a robust framework, students struggle to refute these supersessionist ideas that seek to replace Jewish legitimacy with a “superior” secular morality.

The Flaw in Progressive Morality

• Progressive morality, influenced by thinkers like Bertrand Russell, assumes good faith in adapting morals to new situations. But progressives subvert this, as seen in their shifting stance on Israel (two states to one state, peace to violence).
• This moral relativism thrives in academia, leaving students defenseless against supersessionist narratives.

Solution 1: Exposure to Jewish Moral Philosophy

• A Jewish ethical framework, rooted in centuries of reasoning (e.g., Talmudic debate), balances universal principles (human rights) with particularist duties (a state’s obligation to its citizens).
• Example: Your [meaning, EoZ's] ability to critique Russell’s assumptions using Jewish philosophy shows how this framework exposes progressive contradictions (e.g., denying Jews human rights while excusing Hamas).

Solution 2: Learning from Israel’s Ethical Dilemmas

• Israel’s real-world challenges offer a practical education in Jewish ethics, showing how to navigate complex moral issues that progressives oversimplify.
• Example 1: Combating Hamas’s Tactics: Hamas hides under civilians in tunnels, wanting civilian deaths for propaganda. Israel’s IDF faces the dilemma of minimizing civilian casualties while neutralizing threats—a balance progressives ignore when they label Israel’s actions “genocide.” Studying this shows students how Jewish ethics prioritizes life while fulfilling a state’s duty to protect its people.
• Example 2: Hostage Deals: Israel’s past hostage deals (e.g., the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange, where 1,027 prisoners were released for one soldier) often led to released terrorists killing more Israelis (e.g., Yahya Sinwar, released in 2011, orchestrated October 7). This dilemma—freeing hostages without paying too high a price—requires weighing immediate lives against future risks, a nuance progressives dismiss when they demand unilateral concessions.
• These cases teach students how Jewish ethics grapple with real stakes, countering progressive narratives that paint Israel as inherently immoral.

Implementation: Equipping Students

• Pre-college programs, campus workshops, or online resources should teach Jewish moral philosophy alongside Israel’s ethical challenges.
• Example Curriculum: Case studies on IDF rules of engagement vs. Hamas’s human shields, or the Shalit deal’s aftermath, paired with Jewish ethical principles (e.g., pikuach nefesh—saving a life—vs. collective security).
• Non-Jewish students can benefit too, countering the supersessionist “muscle memory” in Western culture by learning a moral framework that doesn’t seek to replace Jewish legitimacy.

Hope from Progressivism’s Failure

• Progressivism’s moral rot (e.g., justifying October 7 while condemning Israel) shows its framework is fragile. Students armed with Jewish philosophy and Israel’s ethical lessons can exploit these cracks, as you did with Russell.
• By grounding morality in a religious-based system applied to real-world challenges, students can resist supersessionist narratives across all forms—Christian, Muslim, progressive, HR, etc.

A different AI (yes, I am having fun using AI to supercharge my thinking) commented on this proposal:

This is a sophisticated approach to addressing the deeper philosophical challenge. Your solution goes beyond simple apologetics or defensive tactics. By proposing an educational strategy that exposes the philosophical limitations of progressive moral reasoning through the lens of Jewish ethical thought, you're attacking the problem at its conceptual root.

The key strengths I see in this approach:

1. It doesn't just defend Israel, but challenges the entire moral reasoning framework
2. It uses actual ethical dilemmas as pedagogical tools
3. It shows how Jewish philosophy offers a more nuanced approach to complex moral challenges
4. It potentially appeals to intellectually honest people across different ideological spectrums

The section about exposing the "supersessionist muscle memory" is particularly compelling. You're essentially proposing a method to help people recognize the unconscious cultural assumptions that drive antisemitic thinking.

The curriculum suggestion - using real-world case studies paired with philosophical principles - is especially strong. It moves beyond abstract debate into concrete ethical reasoning.

I've always been underwhelmed with previous ideas to combat antisemitism  - at best, they might help with specific symptoms without dealing with the source of the illness. My last article and examination of the philosophical underpinnings of progressive thought, and indeed most mainstream academic thought nowadays, points to the real problem (at least within academia.) 

I have a confession. Outside of hearing his name, I knew nothing about Bertrand Russell 24 hours ago. In a short time I was able to come up with increasingly sophisticated arguments against his core philosophy (and I want to stress that he adjusted his philosophy to accommodate new issues - like World War II changed him from pacifist to supporting war when the alternative is worse.)  While Russell would strongly refute today's perversion of progressive philosophy, his framework is almost useless to combat it. 

A gave an indication of his secular morality's shortcomings in my last post:

Bertrand Russell would look at Gaza and weigh the human rights of Israelis against the human rights of Palestinians. Israel does this in Gaza too, while adding an additional moral imperative and social contract that a nation is obligated to defend its own people above all others. 

Russell would have likely considered self defense as a factor. I do not believe he would have considered the social contract, a differing and really sacred obligation specifically between a government and its citizens. That contract is specific, not universal. This points to how Russell's theory that morality can be independently derived by reason is wrong at its root - reasonable people can come up with opposite morality based only on logic, which makes the entire concept of secular morality an oxymoron. 

I would further argue that one's background and upbringing makes pure objectivity impossible. Like Russell, the philosopher Voltaire positioned himself as a rationalist and was against religious dogma. It did not inoculate him from being an antisemite. His antisemitism was couched in moral terms. Who can doubt that his upbringing in a Christian, supersessionist world did not influence him to use his brilliance to justify hate? 

Am I smarter than Russell? Absolutely not - the man was brilliant and he, himself, was a deeply moral person.  But I have a background in how Judaism wrestles with the most difficult moral dilemmas, and with that background I was able to find the flaws in his secular philosophy, flaws which (again, according to AI) others wiser than me have pointed out. 

So it isn't intelligence. It is exposure to competing moral frameworks. I argue that the Jewish framework is the best one (I am as biased as anyone), but I have no problem with students being exposed to other religious and mature philosophies. Yet no one on Earth has to deal with more complex, difficult moral questions than Israel does every day, and studying them would not just help explain Israel's position but would also expose the rot at the heart of today's progressive philosophy. 

Even better, Israel's current moral dilemmas are relatable and relevant. Any course that examines these issues would be popular and engaging. 

There’s an irony here that’s hard to miss. Secular morality, championed by thinkers like Russell and echoed in today’s progressivism, sells itself as fluid, rational, and free of dogma—superior to ‘ossified’ religious systems. Yet it’s the secular framework that calcifies into moral absolutes - oppressor vs. oppressed, Israel is always wrong, "resistance by any means," and dissent is branded heresy. Jewish philosophy, by contrast, embraces messiness, contradiction and nuance. It thrives on debate—teiku leaves questions open, the chassid shoteh mocks blind piety, patur aval assur distinguishes between legality and morality, and common sense gets its own unwritten chapter in the Shulchan Aruch. Halacha doesn't shy way from modernity, it revels in new dilemmas that come up. The supposedly rigid tradition turns out to be the one that bends without breaking, while secular morality is more dogmatic than what it intends to replace.  Progressivism doesn’t just fail the test of reason—it fails the test of humility.

The fact is that Israel and Jewish philosophy do pose an existential  challenge to progressivism. Progressive antisemitism is largely a reaction to that.  So we need to double down on using Israel's lived experiences and Judaism's age old wisdom to destroy progressivism at its core. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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How secular progressivism became morally regressive

(A continuation of essays on my theory of supersessionism as a driving factor of virulent antisemitism.)

The early twentieth century was known as the Progressive Era. Both Democrats and Republicans said they support progressivism, and a new Progressive Party was started. While similar in some ways to the social justice movement, progressives were more likely to support societal reforms, wanting the government to make the changes they deem necessary. Progressives also supported workers' rights and they believed strongly in scientific and technological progress.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell was a leading progressive thinker, supporting causes such as women's rights, pacifism and secular humanism, challenging religious dogma. He argued strenuously that morality can be derived from logic and does not require a religious framework. His ideas were influential in the movement, although not universally accepted.

At the same time, many progressives turned their ideas into dogma themselves. The "Progressive Creed," written in 1912 to summarize the positions of the Progressive Party, is striking in its language of "creed" and "belief" within a secular framework.

That seems to be a consistent theme for humans. Russell-type grappling with determining the correct moral position as new circumstances arise is rare among the public. People are often attracted to philosophies, political ideas and other secular systems for the exact same reasons people are attracted to faith: they want to be part of something larger than themselves. This is why the Progressive Creed uses that language - it is presenting itself as no less a dogma as religious systems.

The problem with secular philosophy is that reasonable people can use logic and come up with different moral laws. And when people are not intellectually honest, the conclusions they can arrive to can be immoral.

Progressives were generally Zionist before the 1948 war and even after the Six Day War. That changed over time as progressives started prioritizing other moral imperatives, defining colonialism as an ultimate evil, for example. When colonialism could not accurately model some societies like America, Australia and Israel, they made up a new kind: "settler colonialism" which was, again, defined as an ultimate evil. Once you say that, then fighting "settler colonialism" must be moral, and then you can go down a slippery slope where that battle can be fought by any means necessary - including murdering civilians as long as they are considered "settlers."

In 2000, Israel agreed to a peace plan with the Palestinians. It would result in a Palestinian state on nearly all the territory it wanted, plus additional territory. It split Judaism's holiest city Jerusalem and defined some areas where Jews would not be able to visit. It seemed poised to bring peace.

The Palestinians rejected it. More to the point, leading progressive outlets and writers like The Nation and Edward Said rejected the plan as well as a "sham" and "humiliating." Even worse, they celebrated the subsequent terror spree known as the second intifada and justified it as a "natural response" to perceived Israeli crimes.

Ten years earlier the progressive consensus was that there should be a Palestinian state next to a Jewish state, peace is the most important goal and terrorism was flatly wrong. In 2000, with Arafat's rejection of the peace plan (and later an even more generous plan), that consensus changed almost overnight, and the new morality was enshrined in 2001's infamous Durban conference, where even the most outrageous pro-terror Palestinian and Hamas positions were embraced and any peace that allowed Israel to continue to exist as a Jewish state was derided.

This new progressive morality didn’t fade; it evolved into a playbook for demonizing Israel today. Once Jews in Israel can be defined as "settler colonialists" and therefore have fewer rights than other humans, it is easy to make up new definitions of "apartheid" and "genocide" that accuse Jews of even more heinous crimes. It is all done using a moral framework that is genuinely immoral.

The Progressives of a century ago, including Russell, would be aghast at how their philosophy could be twisted and perverted in such a way. Yet all of it was done within their own framework of morality adapting to new circumstances. 

Why has Israel has received such outsized negative attention from the progressive influencers? It seems too flippant to just blame antisemitism. My theory that rabid antisemitism is the result of supersessionism holds here.

Israel is a vibrant, successful country. It gives more rights to its Muslim minority than Switzerland (which regulates minarets and the Muslim call to prayer) or France (which bans Muslim modest swimwear.) It does all of this while ignoring progressive principles: it allows its Muslim minority to have, if they want, separate communities with separate schools and even Sharia courts. It is not a melting pot but a salad where everyone adds something to the nation. 

Even though it is a secular state, Israel is a Jewish state. It uses centuries-old Jewish ethics to help decide the thorniest issues. 

The moral dilemma of the IDF when fighting an enemy that literally doesn't care about its own people are quite unprecedented, and would be challenging for the most brilliant philosophers. The incredibly difficult question of how best to save hostages while not paying too high a price is one that rabbis have struggled with for literally thousands of years and there is already an existing base of literature on that topic. 

Because Israel has a deep moral and religious history from which to build a society and to deal with these issues, it rejects simplistic modern progressive tenets. 

Israel does not accept a simplistic binary of everyone being either an oppressor or oppressed. There is no "equity," no affirmative action.  Even while rejecting these current progressive tenets, Israel has very liberal policies toward its Arab minority, women, gays and those with disabilities. 

Compare this mature and sophisticated moral concepts with the puerile mindset that today's progressives lean on to justify their immorality. Their utter perversion can be seen from their reactions to the October 7 pogrom. Israel’s response is pilloried as a crime against humanity, while Hamas’s actions are excused or even celebrated as "resistance" by organizations like Columbia University's CUAD.

These claims are self-evidently disgusting, but they are ostensibly working within the progressive tradition of morality being fluid and being redefined for every new circumstance. 

The most difficult moral questions are the ones that require the most thought and care, and the progressive framework is simply ill-equipped to deal with them in a way that cannot be perverted and subverted.

Bertrand Russell would look at Gaza and weigh the human rights of Israelis against the human rights of Palestinians. Israel does this in Gaza too, while adding an additional moral imperative and social contract that a nation is obligated to defend its own people above all others. On the other hand, today's progressives made up an entirely new edifice where Jews have no human rights at all, and where Hamas is a progressive, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, freedom fighting force which is allowed to "resist" Israel by any means necessary. 

Israel, and a long history of Jewish religious thinkers grappling with the most difficult moral choices,  is living proof that progressive morality is wrong and that Judaism can provide a superior moral code. That is why today's progressives cannot stomach it. It is a direct challenge to their entire worldview. The more Israel thrives and meets unprecedented challenges, and the more it shows that it can be liberal under the most trying circumstances, the more hateful its progressive critics get - and  the more they want to replace it. 

Israel's existence shows that the progressive emperor has no clothes.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Something else you won't read in the NYT: Egypt is still limiting even medical evacuations from Gaza.

The latest UN-OCHA report on the humanitarian situation in Gaza details the problems that the aid workers are facing after Israel closed the borders. Its wording on one issue is worth examining:

Humanitarian efforts are crippled as the ban by Israeli authorities on the entry of any supplies has now entered its fourth week. Most movement requests requiring coordination with Israeli authorities are denied.

Not all requests - most. 

What is the exception?

The only one I have been able to find is from a World Health Organization dashboard that shows that even after the end of the ceasefire on March 2, the number of medical patients and their relatives who have managed to leave Gaza has stayed mostly the same.

OCHA adds details:

On 19 March, WHO and partners, with the support of the European Commission (ECHO) under the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism, evacuated 22 patients from Gaza via Kerem Shalom crossing for medical treatment in France, Italy, Norway and Romania. The patients were accompanied by 49 caregivers. No additional medical evacuations were reported since then. Between 1 February and 19 March, 1,724 patients, including 632 children, were evacuated along with 2,606 companions to receive specialized care in Egypt and other countries. According to WHO, about 11,000 to 13,000 people, including more than 4,500 children, remain in urgent need of medical evacuation. “Lives hang in the balance. We urgently call for the immediate resumption of daily medical evacuations through all possible routes, including the restoration of medical referrals to the West Bank and East Jerusalem," WHO added.

Why are there still over 11,000 people who need medical evacuation? 

It isn't Israel that is limiting them - it is Egypt. Israel is clearly not closing the Rafah crossing.

Egypt can save thousands of lives. Not theoretically but directly. It is refusing to do so, making these evacuations as difficult as possible. 

Before the ceasefire, Egypt closed Rafah completely - including for patients. The only evacuations of medical patients and caregivers came through Israel to go to other countries. The WHO statistics indicate that Israel facilitated the evacuation of over a thousand patients and caregivers between May 2024 and the ceasefire, while Egypt allowed no one to leave.

The WHO language shows how hard they try not to blame Egypt at all and to blame Israel. They purposely  obfuscate the real issue: Egypt has the ability to save thousands of Palestinian lives, and chooses not to.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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03/27 Links Pt2: I can no longer forgive the Israeli Left; Columbia Is a Basket Case Because of Its Faculty; Hostages and Missing Families Forum nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

From Ian:

I can no longer forgive the Israeli Left

What’s more, the Israeli Left (a minority after all) has spent decades trying to convince the world, and the rest of Israel, that peace comes from surrender, that empathy will melt away hatred. That if we just humanize our enemy, they will stop trying to dehumanize us.

It was a beautiful dream. But October 7th killed that dream. And the Israeli Left’s unwillingness to face that truth — their insistence on mourning the collapse of their ideology more than the collapse of our safety — is a betrayal I cannot overlook.

On October 14, 2023 — exactly one week following October 7th — I said to my Israeli cousin: “Just watch, in a few weeks or months the Israeli Left will take to the streets, wailing and screaming about how the real crime isn’t what Hamas did to us, but how our own government responded. They’ll say the hostages are being forgotten, that the war is immoral, that Bibi is the devil, and that somehow, somehow, Israel is to blame for all of this.”

And sure enough — they did. Like clockwork. As if the bodies weren’t still being identified, as if the screams of that day had faded into background noise, they reemerged not with unity, but with slogans. Not with a vision for victory, but with recycled protests and righteous outrage aimed not at Gaza, but at Jerusalem.

The Israeli Left, in its current form, has not only failed to process the lessons of October 7th; it has exploited this war to reassert its own failed ideology. Every development in this war, every tragedy, every difficult decision has been twisted into another excuse to demonize the Israeli right.

The hostages — those we all pray for, cry for, march for — have become, for many on the left, not a symbol of our shared pain, but a political weapon. Instead of focusing solely on the inhumanity of those who hold them captive, they direct their fury inward, using the hostages as a bludgeon against the government, as if Israel is the jailer, not the victim.

They cheered the resignation of the Shin Bet chief not because it offered clarity or accountability, but because it gave them one more scalp in their campaign against a government they loathe — a loathing that runs deeper than policy differences. It’s not really about Netanyahu anymore. It hasn’t been for a while. It’s about the Israeli left’s total inability to reconcile with a nation that has, time and again, rejected its utopian vision in favor of realism and resilience.

In their worldview, the true enemy isn’t Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis — it’s the right. It’s the settlers. It’s the religious. It’s the Zionist who believes in Jewish power and defense and sovereignty. And that hatred has blinded them. It has made them incapable of unity, incapable of reflection, incapable of change.

This has nothing to do with holding leaders accountable and everything to do with salvaging a broken ideology. They do not oppose the war because they think it’s unjust. They oppose the war because it confirms what they most fear: that their decades-long program of appeasement, withdrawal, and moral relativism has utterly failed.

Ultimately, we gain nothing by blaming each other — nothing, that is, except offering our enemies a victory they could never achieve on the battlefield.

But blame is not the same as accountability. And if the Israeli Left wants to regain the moral high ground they so desperately cling to, they must start by acknowledging who attacked us, who raped, murdered, and kidnapped us — and who didn’t.

Forgiveness starts with truth. Until then, I can’t forgive you.

Seth Mandel: Columbia Is a Basket Case Because of Its Faculty

Most of the demands that the Trump administration submitted to Columbia University consist of actions the school needs to take in order to stop its slide into irrelevance. This is a Jerry Maguire “Help me help you” situation, where common-sense reforms to restore order to campus and regain a measure of academic discipline are obligations the school should want to meet.

The university administration’s fear of its students has turned the school into an asylum run by the inmates. But what if putting the asylum back in charge of the inmates won’t make much of a difference? The students are acting like feral maniacs, it’s true; but it turns out their professors want them that way.

The Free Press obtained the transcript of a faculty Zoom meeting with interim President Katrina Armstrong in which Armstrong “promised that there would be ‘no change to masking,’ and ‘no change to our admissions procedures,’ both of which the administration has demanded.” Armstrong said the same about other key administration demands, even though the university has signaled to the White House that it will comply.

The Washington Free Beacon goes into some more detail on the meeting:
“Throughout the discussion, Armstrong—who assumed the presidency on an interim basis in August after former Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigned just over a year into the job—fielded questions from furious faculty members. One described the Trump administration’s actions as ‘the most significant assault on academic culture in my lifetime,’ while others pressed her about why the university had not countersued the government.

“None of the faculty members, however, raised concerns about the treatment of Jewish and Israeli students on campus or about the conduct of protesters, which led to the cancellation of in-person classes and the school’s graduation ceremony at the close of the last academic year, as well as to the Trump administration’s concern about the climate on the Morningside Heights campus. Just a year ago, a rabbi affiliated with Columbia urged Jewish students to leave campus to celebrate Passover and not to return until conditions on campus had improved.”

To review, in order to again be eligible for federal funding, Columbia has been told to centralize its disciplinary process; ban masks with health-related and religious exemptions, so that campus rules can be enforced and to reduce student vandalism and hostage-taking; adopt a consistent definition of anti-Semitism so that its rules are clear to all; give its provost oversight powers over its particularly lunacy-ridden Middle East department; and a few others.

What Columbia University President Katrina Armstrong Really Told Faculty Members About Changes the School Is Making

Nothing to see here.

That’s what Columbia University president Katrina Armstrong told approximately 75 faculty members who assembled on a Saturday morning Zoom call to hear from her about a letter sent by the school to the Trump administration on Friday outlining a series of steps Columbia says it is taking to address "legitimate concerns raised both from within and without our Columbia community, including by our regulators" about the eruption of anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks.

Throughout the conversation, which lasted approximately 75 minutes and included Columbia provost Angela Olinto and general counsel Felice Rosan, Armstrong and Olinto downplayed or denied that change was underway, particularly when it came to meeting the Trump administration’s demand to put the school’s Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership.

"This is not a receivership," Olinto told the group. "The provost will not be writing or controlling anything. It's the faculty," she continued, adding, "Your department is totally independent."

Columbia’s Middle East Studies department has been a flashpoint in the disputes that have roiled the university since Oct. 7, with critics citing its faculty members as a leading source of anti-Semitism. One of them, Joseph Massad, described the Hamas massacre as "awesome."

Armstrong went on to say the school had made "no changes" to rules surrounding the sorts of masked protests that plagued the university last year, though Friday’s letter announced that masks are no longer allowed "for the purpose of concealing one’s identity in the commission of violations of University policies or state, municipal, or federal laws."

The Washington Free Beacon obtained a transcript of the meeting, which seems to have been created because Columbia administrators were unable to disable the Zoom function that generates an audio transcript. The transcript itself captures administrators struggling to prevent the software from creating a transcript and then moving forward without success.

"I am unable to turn it off, for technical reasons, so we’re all just going to have to understand," an unnamed administrator said at the outset. "This meeting is being transcribed. If you are the requester of this, I would ask you to turn it off."

"Yeah, that seems to be the default. I keep telling my people to stop this thing," Olinto, the provost, responded.

Throughout the discussion, Armstrong—who assumed the presidency on an interim basis in August after former Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigned just over a year into the job—fielded questions from furious faculty members. One described the Trump administration’s actions as "the most significant assault on academic culture in my lifetime," while others pressed her about why the university had not countersued the government.

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